So if you never seem to find where your collar stays are after you've used them this article was written for you.

Here it is. The solution to all your forgetful collar stays problems.

When To Remove Your Collar Stays - All 5 Instances

1. As soon as you get home from a hard days work

Before you throw your shirt on your chair, kick your feet up and open the ol' laptop to stream Game of Thrones, don't forget to place your collar stays in a designated spot.

Preferably next to your accessories such as your watches, bracelets and sunnies. Keeping them next to your watches ensures that you'll always see them before leaving the house. And who leaves their house without a watch? Exactly. No one.

If you happen to forget to remove them upon arriving home. Then the next situation you definitely need to.

2. Before hanging your shirt in your wardrobe

Shirt still hanging on the back of your chair? It's time to hang it in your wardrobe. That GoT episode was intense and you need a break from all the gore and nudity. So you decide to clean up a bit and hang your shirt.

But don't forget to take the collar stays out of their pockets before.

If you skipped the first opportunity to remove your collar stays upon arriving home, then this is the time to do it.

Try to keep your collar stays out for using them on your other collared shirts for the rest of the week. This would only occur if you happened to forget to remove them the last time.

3. Before throwing your shirt in the washing machine

Due to the vigorous nature of how washing machines work, metal collar stays can certainly destroy both your shirts and washing machine drum.

Your regular metal collar stays are about the size and density of a 10c coin and almost 20c depending on the metal material.

We've conducted experiments for our He.Stays collar stays and washing machines. We left our collar stays in a regular dress shirt and proceeded to wash the shirt on the regular setting.

Although there was no damage on the first wash, after the sixth we found dents in our drum and a few rips on the shirt collar.

4. Before you iron your shirt

You need to remove collar before ironing your shirt. Especially if you're donning any form of metal collar stays. The metal can absorb the heat and can burn you. Even worse, the hot metal can burn your shirt collar.

Be cautious withreadilyinstalled plastic collar stays and ironing your shirt as they can melt. Cheap plastic collar stays have a low melting point that can melt away in your collar. We recommend using our towel and iron method to straighten your collar stays instead of ironing them whilst in the shirt.

5. Before going to the dry cleaners

If you own high-quality metal collar stays or any other novelty kind such as bone, mother of pearl or wood collar stays, you won't be getting them back if you left them with the dry cleaners.

If you do happen to remember that you forgot to remove them, kindly go back to the store to retrieve them or call your dry cleaner to keep them on hold. It shouldn't be a problem and you should already have some sort of rapport built with your dry cleaner by now.

What if your shirt doesn't have collar stays already installed and doesn't have collar pockets for collar stays?

Here's a quick tip - Shirts that don't contain collar pocket are likely low quality. Why? Because manufacturers who prefer lower budgets at the cost of poorer quality do not install collar pockets to keep their costs low.

Additional fabrics are used to install collar pockets and their labourers to create them would spend lots of extra time to create this small detail. Chances are if the manufacturer of your shirt does this then the rest of the shirt may lack in quality than those with collar pockets.

Thus, collar pockets are absolutely necessary for dress shirts. And high-quality shirts should have collar pockets.

In Conclusion

To ensure your collar stays don't go missing, the best place to keep your collar stays collection is right beside your watches as you're likely to be wearing a watch on a daily basis.

There are most appropriate times for when to remove your collar stays. They are:

Upon arriving home from work

Before hanging your shirt in your wardrobe

Before throwing your shirt in the washing machine

Before you iron your shirt

Before going to the dry cleaners

Are there any situations that we've missed where it would be necessary to remove your collar stays?